waTeR and aLTePeTL in The LaTe sixTeenTh-cenTuRy ciTy • 207dates are known to be after 1531 (the tecpan of ca. 1542, the
Portales de Tejada of ca. 1549, and the fountain of ca. 1585),
allowing us to assign a terminus post quem to the original of
the mid-1580s. 77 The extensive use of Nahuatl (rather than
Spanish) and limited use of loan words suggest that we are
still dealing with a sixteenth-century document.
A likely moment for the creation of the original map
is mid-October of 1589, when Viceroy Álvaro Manrique
de Zúñiga, marqués de Villamanrique (r. 1585–1590),
responded to indigenous complaints about the disorder
in the Tianguis of Mexico and sent the alcalde ordinario of
the city’s Spanish cabildo, Gonzalo Gómez de Cervantes,
to the tianguis to resolve the problem by reorganizing space
in the market, and “put in order all Indian women and all
the others within the traza of the market so that they are
grouped together, and not interspersed with those selling
other types of merchandise.” 78 Eighteen days later, the vice-
roy again dispatched Gómez de Cervantes to resolve a com-
plaint brought by the indigenous marketwomen who sold
blankets. 79 In designating certain blocks to certain prod-
ucts and grouping like products together, this map seems
to arise from some moment of market organization. Its use
of Nahuatl texts and hieroglyphs is significant, for it means
that, if created to address the 1589 complaint, Gómez de
Cervantes was unlikely to have created the map of the mar-
ket himself to organize and assign plots to vendors, for it
is in Nahuatl, not Spanish. Instead, he likely turned to a
native scribe to draw up the proposed plan and may also
have left the map in the hands of the native leaders—the
ones who would have understood Nahuatl and its glyphic
representations—for them to carry the organization out.
As represented in this map, the tianguis is an ordered
place with sellers grouped by wares, their plots shown as
“trazado”—that is, laid out in organized fashion. In its
quadripartite, bounded space, it also evokes cosmic models
that left their imprint on folio 2r of the Codex Mendoza
(see figure 1.3). On this map as well, the façade of the tecpan
is poorly drawn, but its imposing presence is still registered
in the upper left. We see the row of large disks that marked
important buildings in the city running along its cornice.
Also visible is the arched portal to the tecpan’s internal
plaza that lay directly opposite the southwest entrance
of the tianguis. Anyone entering from the south or west,
including most likely all the traffic from the canoes from
the southern docks and the carts coming along the cause-
way of San Juan, would need to pass alongside it before
entering the tianguis. Given the traffic to the market, the
adjacent tecpan was where most city residents and those
coming in from outside regions would encounter civic
architecture. Its exterior wall was decorated with a ban-
ner showing the indigenous gobernadores, another way of
reminding the urban public of the presence of native rulers.
The tecpan, of course, likely first constructed in the 1540s,
had been updated and rebuilt over time, but the visual lan-
guage it employed of the retaining wall, marked with disks
of “preciousness” at the top, was known throughout central
Mexico as a marker of the palaces of indigenous rulers. The
addition of the arched doorway shows the mastery of a
relatively new technology, the keystone. Not only was the
market in the same location as it had been in the Mexica
city but also the sensual experiences it offered—the sights
of the piles of chilies, the bright whiplash of cochineal-
dyed embroidery, the odors of fish and ground tobacco—
gave individuals an enduring connection to the memories
of the city’s past and a link to its spatial history. These deep
and complex meanings that lived space carried help us bet-
ter understand why the native cabildo was able to risk bitter
lawsuits in order to insist on its dominance in the space
of the tianguis.concLusion
In bringing a canal of water into the Tianguis of Mexico,
Valeriano would not only provision the city’s residents,
but also restore the image of the altepetl once found in the
Templo Mayor, where a straight canal bearing freshwater
from Chapultepec ran all the way into the temple precinct
and filled the pools there, making the ceremonial center a
microcosm of the larger altepetl. 80 He did so against enor-
mous odds, as the plague of cocoliztli devastated the popu-
lation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, with its effects, like food
shortages and other aftershock plagues, continuing for the
life of the aqueduct project. Valeriano’s relationships with
the Franciscans, reaching back to long before he entered
the tecpan, ensured him the backing of powerful supporters
in the city; his relationships with Viceroy Enríquez and
subsequent viceroys were also mutually accommodating.
For instance, despite Viceroy Enríquez’s reforms to indig-
enous offices, whereby officeholders were to receive a salary
and little other compensation, Valeriano was granted by
him and successive viceroys the labor of four peons to work
his fields. 81 But if we take the view from the tecpan and the
tianguis, one reason for Valeriano’s long rule might have
been his careful manipulation of powerful symbols, like